The Merger of Senator Max Baucus and Leo
Giacometto:
Washington’s Pay to Play Politics Hits the Speedwayby Joshua Frank
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 8, 2005

It
doesn’t get much more devious than this. Last month, on the 30th of
October, Democratic Senator Max Baucus of Montana held a little “NASCAR
Fundraiser” in Atlanta, Georgia. The cause and locale were far from Big
Sky Country. Attendees of the benefit forked over $2,500 a piece to eat
breakfast at the lavish Ritz-Carlton Hotel and spend an afternoon at the
Atlanta Motor Speedway.

The brains behind
the peddle-to-the-metal fundraiser belonged to Leo Giacometto, a sleazy
Republican operative who served as Montana Republican Senator Conrad
Burns’ Chief of Staff during the latter part of the 1990s. Giacometto was
one of the key architects of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and has since
enjoyed the turnstile environment of Washington politics and now heads up
Gage LLC, a corporate lobbying firm based in DC.

Giacometto has long
been a key player in national telecom policy and some of his firm’s top
clients include AT&T, Nextel, MCI, and Bresnan Communications.
Giacometto’s old boss Conrad Burns chairs the Commerce Committee
subcommittee on telecommunications and Max Baucus is a ranking member of
the finance committee, which also plays a huge role in developing national
telecom policy.

Leo Giacometto is
paying to play.

According to Barrett
Kaiser, a spokesperson for Senator Max Baucus, Giacometto is working for
free for the Senator’s reelection campaign, which is coming up in 2008.
“Max has enjoyed widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans
over his many years serving Montanans,” Kaiser told the Billings
Gazette. “He's proud of that support.”

“I believe that he's
good for what I believe in,” prattled Giacometto.

Indeed, Baucus is
good for Giacometto’s interests. The senator is an ardent supporter of
market deregulation and voted in favor of the atrocious 1996
Telecommunications Act, which has undermined competition and allowed huge
telecommunications companies to gobble up the industry. Of course,
monstrous corporations like those that Giacometto represents and Baucus
regulates prefer mergers and acquisitions to competition, and their
lobbying for the 1996 Act have paid off in full.

Despite the lustrous
guarantees, the Telecommunications Act has done anything but increase
market competition. In fact, the complete opposite has occurred. Smaller
companies have not been able to even dent the monopoly strongholds of the
dominant companies, gaining only one percent of the market share overall
since the passage of the Act, reports the Consumers Union, the nonprofit
publisher of Consumer Report.

For example: “The
major cable companies, who have never competed with each other, continue
to refuse to invade each others' service areas. Instead, they have merged
and swapped wires creating huge dominant national players holding tightly
controlled clusters with joint ventures permeating the industry,” says the
Consumers Union.

To put it simply:
the consumers have not fared well, the industry giants have.

Of course,
Giacometto and Baucus knew all too well this would occur. That’s why the
companies that benefited have since padded Giacometto’s salary and Baucus’
campaign coffers.

After President Bill
Clinton signed the Act into law in February of 1996, AT&T went ahead and
bought TCI Corporation, Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged, Southwestern Bell
and PacTel merged to become SBC and then purchased Ameritech, MCI
Communications and WorldCom joined to become MCI WorldCom and Bell
Atlantic and GTE merged to become Verizon.

This is
monopolization, not capitalism. Not surprisingly, Verizon has donated tens
of thousands of dollars to Max Baucus.

Soon, we are likely
to see Giacometto raise bundles for his former employer Senator Burns’
reelection campaign which comes up next year. Business in Washington isn’t
about party loyalty or ideology or constituents; it’s about greed,
corruption and campaign donations. That’s why Giacometto has no qualms
with working for both the Republicans and Democrats. It pays off and pays
well.

No doubt Montana
wouldn’t benefit much, if at all, by reelecting Senator Max Baucus. Of
course, that’s what Leo Giacometto and the industries he represents are
counting on it.

Joshua Frank is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals
Helped Reelect George W. Bush, published by Common Courage Press. You
can order a copy at a discounted rate at
www.brickburner.org. Joshua can be reached at
Joshua@brickburner.org.